OLYMPIC JOURNAL / Seeking something meaningful

Published 4:00 am, Wednesday, August 25, 2004

2004-08-25 04:00:00 PDT Athens -- Since I are a college graduate, I enjoy reading. I read books and stuff. Also magazines, newspapers, even the backs of cereal boxes.

But for the last two weeks, all I've been reading are results sheets and start lists. It's a bit mind-numbing scanning through all those meters, kilometers, kilograms and a confounding procession of names like KLESZCZYNSKA (Pol), TEERAWIWATHANA (Tha) and TSOUMELEKA (Gre).

On Tuesday I reached a crisis point. I had to have something to read in the English language.

There's a newsstand in the press center so I grabbed some publications in my native tongue and came away with the London Daily Mail ("How the pressures of being Paula caught up with our golden girl"), the European edition of Time magazine ("Europe's secret capitals -- where it's really happening"), USA Today's international edition ("Mexico wins Cal Ripken World Series") and something called Zoo, Britain's biggest men's weekly ("The idiot Olympics," featuring "men's individual fall down").

Regarding the latter, the back of the mag featured photos of Maurice Greene, so it had to be legit, right? How was I to know the editorial staff would ridicule the Olympics by editorializing that "most of the athletes are pumped up to their veiny, bulging eyeballs on steroids, the first week is almost wholly taken up with swimming, now officially recognized as the world's dullest pastime, and there's even room for preposterous guff like dressage, in which inbred toffs attempt to pilot horses sideways."

Mostly, though, I ingest a steady diet of Olympics results and pour through an expanding collection of reference books that combined weigh enough to qualify as a weightlifting event.

In Atlanta in 1996 they passed out a sheet of paper informing journalists that 1 million sheets of paper had been passed out to date. Make that 1,000, 001.

There are nuggets to be unearthed amidst all the detritus, however. Trees will not have been felled in vain.

For example, one guide says that Swedish high jumper Stefan Holm, the gold medalist, "has jumped 56 cm over his own height indoors." That presents a problem. How tall is Holm and what the heck is 56 cm? Consulting one ponderous reference book, I see that Holm is a little guy for a high jumper, 5 feet, 11 1/4 inches. Consulting yet another reference book, I learn that 56 centimeters is 1 foot, 10 inches. That means a guy less than 6-feet tall jumped 7-9 1/4.